Posts Tagged ‘training’

This Saturday I had the privilege of attending Xavier Shay’s “Database is Your Friend” workshop right here in Kansas City. It explores the enterprise domain of high-traffic, mission-critical databases in Rails. At $350, the price tag trumps just about every regional Ruby or Rails conference I’ve heard of. It was worth the price, and more. It would have been well worth the expense of travel and lodging if it had been out of town.

I’ve never had such a thorough learning experience. Xavier had a git repository setup with several branches of a basic Rails app, which we all cloned. He would give a 10-15 minute overview of a difficult concept, then we would checkout a given branch, and spend about 20 minutes completing whatever part of the code Xavier had omitted. We used test-driven development much of the time, which forced us to fully understand the cause and effect of each technique.

Xavier was in constant motion, visiting each of the six students to ensure everybody got it. After all, the exercises themselves were mission critical, because the following lessons built upon them. After experiencing this, I wonder why all teaching isn’t done this way. The “Long Lecture, Here’s Your Homework, Now Get Out” system I remember from college could benefit a lot from this.

It’s obvious a lot of love went into the design of the workshop. The flow was so natural that several times, one of us would ask a question and Xavier would answer that the next segment addresses it. The result was a natural progression of solving more and more complex problems.

If you struggle with (or wonder about) data integrity and high-traffic database issues, take the opportunity to learn from Xavier Shay on his current tour.

PS –

While this workshop is definitely worth travelling, I didn’t have to. Wes Garrison of Databasically, who helps organize our monthly Ruby meetings, took the initiative. Xavier normally attaches his workshop to conferences, but Wes looked at the schedule and saw that Xavier had a small gap between his Chicago and Austin dates. Wes offered to arrange both travel and lodging for Xavier, who luckily agreed to squeeze another workshop into his busy schedule. Wes, thank you.